Human Aspiration Quotes

Finds progress, man's distinctive mark alone, Not God's, and not the beast's; God is, they are, Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.

A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.

Man is the being whose project it is to be God.

Our heroes are the men who do things which we recognize with regret and sometimes with a secret shame that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself there would be no heroes.

The conviction that freedom is a universal desire is not the property of any political camp. ... Yet those who hold it remain a precious few, outnumbered many times over by the skeptics who don't.

Arise, awake! This path is arduous. So we learn from the wise, and we have to follow in the footsteps of the wise. The path of spirituality is not a bed of roses. But neither is it a chimerical mist. The Golden Shores of the Beyond are not a mere promise. The crown of human aspiration is bound to be fulfilled on the Golden Shores of the Beyond.

Do you remember how life yearned out of childhood toward the "great thing?" I see that it is now yearning forth beyond the great thing toward the greater one.

We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

The one impulse in man which cannot be erased is his impulse toward freedom, his impulse toward sanity, toward higher levels of attainment in all of his endeavors.

I want to change things for the better, just like everybody else.

In the final analysis, the hope of every person is simply peace of mind.

Even the men most richly endowed with ability, education, and opportunity, even the giants of the race, after the completest life possible, feel, as they stand on the edge of the grave, that they are but human acorns with all their possibilities still in them, just beginning to sprout.

Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars.

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.

The American people can have anything they want; the trouble is they don't know what they want.

I'm in love with cities. I find them amazing, the quiet co-ordination of thousands of people, going about what we're trying to do, and that organism of the city nurturing human aspiration, and the actual city fabric itself being a special thing rather than just infrastructure.

The dream of man's heart ... is that life may complete in significant pattern.

Peace - the word evokes the simplest and most cherished dream of humanity. Peace is, and has always been, the ultimate human aspiration. And yet our history overwhelmingly shows that while we speak incessantly of peace, our actions tell a very different story.

All cities are impressive in their way, because they represent the aspiration of men to lead a common life; those people who wish to live agreeable lives, and in constant intercourse with one another, will build a city as beautiful as Paris.

The blue distance, the mysterious Heavens, the example of birds and insects flying everywhere —are always beckoning Humanity to rise into the air.

We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.

All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life.

I'm speaking of the character of human beings, not what they believe in. I'm speaking of those who won't accept a useless life just because they were born to it. I mean those who would be something better. They work, they sacrifice, they do things..." He was moved by this, and I was a little surprised that I'd said it. Yet I felt I'd had hurt him somehow. "There is blessedness in that." I said. "There's sanctity. And God or no God, there is goodness in it. I know this the way I know the mountains are out there, that the stars shine.